Wednesday, July 12, 2017

Within 20 Years, Moscow will have 35 Million Residents and Almost a Third of Them will be Muslims, Russian Experts Say

Paul
Goble

Staunton, July 12 – The population
of the Moscow agglomeration by 2035 will reach 35 million, of whom 25 to 30
percent will be Muslims,” according to experts at the Mayak Discussion Club.
The city will be ever more expensive to live in and ever more uncomfortable,
and taxes will go up because the oil money will have dried up.

One consequence may be a demand for
greater local democracy at least in the capital but it will also mean that the
capital will form a far larger share of the population of the country, well above
a third, and that this along with the Muslim share will make the capital an
increasingly “Asiatic” one (ttolk.ru/2017/05/31/москва-2035-35-млн-человек-и-рождение-полит/).

The
presentations of three members of the club are summarized below.Dmitry Glukhovsky, author of the anti-utopian
novel Metro-2033, suggested that Moscow will increasingly resemble Beijing, a
capitalist economy but one in which the state exercises “total” control over
the population.

There
are already 160,000 video cameras in operation in the Russian capital. By 2035,
the novelist says, there will be far more; and the state will be able to track “every
move” of every citizen.

Sergey
Gorigorov, described as a politician, also described an anti-utopia, a city of
50 million people living in high-rise apartment blocks and allowed to travel to
the center of the city only occasions.At the edge of this agglomeration, he suggests, will be areas dominated
by Islamists who will impose shariat law.

And
Pavel Pryanikov, who operates the Tolkovatel internet portal, suggested that
Moscow will be less the Asiatic city other speakers projected than “a
peripheral European” one like Istanbul, Buenos Aires or Mexico City.

He
said that he would talk about the future only in terms of a continuation of
current trends. First of all, Russia “will remain a raw materials exports and
highly centralized, and Moscow as now will be the main center of money,
attractive work, knowledge, medicine, and entertainment.”

Its
population will continue to grow but the amount of new housing won’t keep up.
As a result, prices for apartments will rise; and taxes on property will as
well. Because these will be paid by the population directly, Muscovites will
demand a more immediate say in how they are spent by insisting on more
democratic forms of governance.

Pryanikov
said that one of the most important changes will be the composition of the city’s
population. Because two-thirds of gastarbeiters will settle in Moscow, the city
will have as many as five million Central Asian residents by 2035. Together
with Muslims already there, they will boost the Islamic share of the city’s
population to 25-30 percent.

As
a result, Pryanikov continued, “we shall see then their growing role in the
life of the city: the appearance eof Muslim districts, life according to
shariat law, new mosques [there are only six officially registered ones now],
and medrassahs as well.”

But
perhaps the most important trend he mentioned was the rise of voluntary
mobility especially among older people. By 2035, there will be retirees without
pensions and they will make ends meet by selling their Moscow apartments,
buying two or more elsewhere, living in one and renting the other to make ends
meet.

In
other comments, he suggested that “the quality of social relations in the city
will improve,” with declines in the amount of crime and alcoholism and a rising
life expectancies, “the result,” he says, “of the conscious responsibility of
citizens for their own lives” rather than of any action by the state.

Unfortunately,
Pryanikov concluded, the consequences of this will not be good for the rest of
Russia: There like in many countries of “the Second world,” life will be
concentrated in the megalopolises, “and the remaining territory will be viewed
only as places to get raw materials or for simple agricultural and industrial
production.”